Darkness gave way to the uncomfortable slant of dawn throwing yellow jail bars across her body through shutters as she lay, twisted and sweaty from dreams she could not remember. She also could not remember who, what or where she was, and could not see herself—only the parallel lines of light the sun illuminated.
She lay, paralyzed for a moment and confused. She felt a vague notion of having to use the bathroom somewhere underneath the light and wondered how on earth (Yes! Earth! That's where she was...) she would get to the toilet with no body. Did she ever have one? Was it beautiful? How silly and vain her thoughts seemed to her.
The smell of flower decay registered in her head, though faintly (Yes! Smell! She had a nose...). It was then that she felt an irritating, scratching sensation beneath her left shoulder, and then she actually saw her shoulder, and then her nose appeared between the peripheries of her sight, and slowly, methodically, the rest of her body revealed itself to her. It was pressed up against the boy who faced the wall and whose chest rose and fell in shallow, dreamless rhythm. The boy was on a bed, as was she, and it was his. The shutters were his. The light was, too.
She reached behind her shoulder and pulled out a single, gray petal of a rose. “How familiar,” she thought, but could not place where she had seen it before.
Her movement stirred the boy who stretched his long, beautiful limbs out, and then around her, and in that instant her discomfort and remaining confusion dissipated. His large blue eyes opened to her, pulling her into their cool, anesthetizing quiet.
“Hi,” he said, echoes of the tough lovemaking from the previous evening washing over them and leaving wicked smiles behind. She noticed a small green feather caught on his brow, and she blew it gently away.
“What time is it?” she asked, voice thick with sleep.
When the boy's eyes went hard with steely fear, she tumbled out from them, and the light from the shutters--much sharper now--once again stole her body away. He ripped himself from the nest of bed sheets to find his watch. “Shit. I'm late,” he said.
Sinking back into paralysis, she watched him pick his black, crumpled clothing off the floor. She felt nothing but the boy's urgency as she thought, detached, “But how am I going to get home again?”
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